Mushrooms from the East
by ck24
Summary: Hashish, who is a character, and actually named that, leaves home to pursue a distant location. In the process he collects many Pokemon and the like and just has a generally chill time.


I think this is my first Pokemon fanfiction. Logically speaking, if this is my first, then all that Pokemon propaganda that preceded it couldn't really have been mine. I guess that means I don't own Pokemon, and thank God, because this is basically what I would end up doing to the franchise.

For your convenience and my own, I've made a brief list of the offensive things (drugs, sex, homosexuality, profanity, among others to be added when relevant) I know will come up, with varying attention to detail, in this story. If you find these offensive things to, in fact, be offensive, you will take offense to this story, and that won't be good for any of us. What I'm really trying to tell everyone here is not to sue me, or, worse yet, flame me, about, say, being offended.

I have several more chapters written and a generally thorough outline of how everything will progress. I suppose the haste with which these chapters are posted would depend on public sympathy, meaning reviews, which I like, seeing as I'd have no rational reason to continue to expose this if no such public existed. Please feel free to express your preferably detailed and profound opinions, bearing in mind any articles that may have been previously mentioned in the past few paragraphs.

* * *

Hashish had lived in a van in the upper abandoned sect of Cianwood City for seventeen years. He was born in Saffron, back in Kanto, to a prostitute and a thug, and promptly handed off to a rusty, unsuccessful actor friend of the latter, and the two had been mooching off Yurimaru's brother, Chuck, for a good, long time before the teenager finally upped and left.

Yurimaru, the shitty actor, was HIV positive for a while now, and dying. One day they were riding the coast, trying to forget all the death lingering behind the closed windows, and Hash ran the house into a palm tree right outside the city, flipping it and setting fire to not only their entire stash, but the acid lab hidden in the roof of the vehicle. Chuck had a stroke and couldn't pay for their insurance.

Hash caught a ride on a cargo ship to New Bark Town by the next week, leaving purposefully without notice so as to assuage the complications in the departure process. He sold the remaining parts of the van for about twenty-thousand yen and jacked his Uncle Chuck's marijuana provisions, stuffing it in a worn backpack he'd owned since his early youth. Between his various escapades for money throughout that week, he managed to secure a living space for Yurimaru in the renowned local medicine shop, at the opposite end of the island. Hashish had had to sleep with the owner, and she was painfully clingy. Consequently, both Yurimaru and Hash were struggling with the consequences of the move.

Relatively speaking, Hash was an attractive boy. He didn't shave, and he needed to, and he liked punk rock, so he wanted to be the only punk in Cianwood, which he was. Besides having blue hair and strikingly prominent sideburns, his heritage alone made him look conspicuously different than everyone else in town. His accent, however, thick and hoarse, was the same, and completely unique to the area. The sailors on the ship returning to the inland were skeptical.

"So I guess all you fuckers talk like that here," said the largest of the four sitting in a circle in the cabins. "Get you the ladies?"

By all means, Hash was fine with the ladies. He was more experienced than every other kid in the city, who had to spend time in school instead of smoking and getting laid.

"Dude, don't beat me up," Hash said. The fellow had thrust the hand-crafted glass pipe directly in his face, in the single most threatening fashion the situation could offer.

"What a puss," said a skinny, creepy one. He scratched his bandanna thoughtfully then grinned, lighting up in such a grotesque way that his nostrils flared and his gums caught a glare from the single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. "I bet you do; I bet them island chicks fuckin' love that. But you know what? None of them northern bitches are gonna want to fuck your freak ass. No one looks like that in the fucking city, in big ol' Goldenrod with the bros and shit. We still got some chivalry, none o' that bullshit and so on. You know?"

The two nodded in agreement, simultaneously eyeing the floor with a certain sense of pride. Every man on the vesicle was from Goldenrod, born, raised, and educated at a very underground institute for stupid water-loving Team Aqua grunts. The cargo ship, in fact, was a huge, floating example of criminal intent, full of long-outlawed drugs and suspiciously powerful Pokemon with ambiguous origins.

The female in the room, on the other hand, had nothing to do with Goldenrod City. She was from Pummelo Island and exceedingly bitter about everything.

"You all talk too goddamn much," was her consistent opinion, each time enforced with a special look of malice in Hash's direction in recollection of the lengthy monologue he had given at one point about why he hadn't brought more weed—a monologue given more for the sake of his own mourning than as any sort of back-story.

Hash thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. It was certainly a plausible idea, as he had never been that close to anyone from outside of Cianwood, let alone the Orange Islands, before. Her expression was constantly a disgruntled one, and her features short of perfect by most means, but he felt she made up for it by having a stud in her nose and a creatively unnecessary array of different shades of brown in her hair.

She was also the person who had allowed him onto the ship. The rest of the crew would have actually been more welcoming than she was, but Hash was well-endowed, so he felt a girl would be a better decision.

He had approached her with a large blunt between his fingers, handing it to her generously then smiling brightly for a few moments.

"What are you, a whore?" she asked. She sounded sarcastic, but was in reality very sincere about the inquiry.

"No, I wouldn't say that," Hash responded, pondering the thought. "That would imply I had sex for money. And, you know, I do have sex, right? But not for money. That seems kind of cheap, to me, and I like sex a lot. In fact, I like whores, I guess, there just aren't any here. But if there were, I wouldn't be one. I'd be like, a whore-ee. I suppose. I don't know, your boxes smell good, is what I wanted to say. My name is Jeremiah, and I would like to go to New Bark to go sight-seeing and such."

"You're a fucking retard, aren't you? Can you lift shit?"

"Only some shit. Not like, buildings, or cars."

"Why don't you help us get the shit on the ship? And then if you get the last box you can just kind of sit in the loading area until one of the gay sailors decides to let you into the cabins or on deck or something." She took a long drag from the blunt and walked away with it. Hash smiled again, optimistic, picked up a discarded blue bandanna from the ground, and tied it around his head.

"I'm fucking handsome," he said, then grabbed the edge of the nearest box.

No one had mistaken Hash for being a member of the crew because he had too many chains on and no uniform, so he took off the bandanna once he'd gotten on board. He kept it anyways, because it reminded him of the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and because he thought he looked cool in it.

The first person to speak to him was a short, tanned gay man named Henri. He told him that the only girl on the ship was the captain, Shane, and she was not beautiful. She was a man, he had told Hash. Henri eventually lost interest upon deciding the boy was not enigmatic so much as uneventful—and he had blue hair, which was strange.

That night, in the cabins, where the three men discussed woman and the one woman mooched off Hash's pot, the conversation began to shift erratically. At some point, they were all so stoned that it did not seem so unthinkable to talk about their aspirations, as they began to then.

"You know, I never even liked sailing that much. I didn't do it as a kid. I had this Wingull—and by God, I still have it!—well, I liked flying more than anything. Just like, flying around. So I always thought I'd be doing that when I was twenty-three. But I'm not doing that. I'm fuckin' evil, how the hell close to the sky is that, even?" the large man had told the circle. He was spread out across the floor, enchanted by the intricacies of the wood above him.

Skinny shook his head. "I wanted to be in the circus, because of my dad. My dad wasn't even in the circus, but he sure loved it. He was fuckin' the tightrope walker whenever she came to town. One time he even fucked her kid. So when I was the islander's age—how old are you, even, punkass? I don't even fuckin' care, I guess, I was just a fuckin' kid and I tried to leave the school so I could join that circus. It turned out Pa didn't even want me to fuckin' be in the circus. He called me a fucker and he was disgusted. That's when I knew I was always going to be a grunt, 'cause I let him fuck with me right then. At the end I didn't even want to join the circus 'cause of him—it was 'cause I was in love with the goddamn circus, that's why, and if I coulda fuckin' told him that, it wouldn't have mattered what he'd said. I still coulda fuckin' left."

"I wanted to be the captain of some shit ship sailing back and forth dealing shit drugs and stealing shit Pokemon so we could pump them up with even shittier drugs," Shane said. Everyone laughed except for Hash, and they laughed because it was preposterous, not because it was anticlimactic.

There was a pause after that. It may have been an hour, or a minute, or just the time it took for the circle to exchange glances about why the pause had to exist when earlier there had been none. Hash was staring at his hands, sitting against the wall. After the pause, his lips began to move, and sounds began to bounce off the limits of the room. The pause had occurred because he was appalled that Shane would make a mockery of the exchange. His input had come at last because he wanted her to understand, and his voice had echoed so brilliantly because he wasn't talking for anyone besides her to hear, then, not even himself.

"One day Yurimaru told me about the mountains, where he met my father. My father was from Saffron, but his dad wasn't. His dad was born in the East, and where the East starts the shore breaks against mountains upon mountains upon mountains. When you reach the shore the mountains tower so high that they become the horizon, so you can't see the sun both rise and set until you get to the very top.

"My father never reached the very top. Neither did Yurimaru. They got to the other side, though, going through the caves, and they smoked the cannabis leaves they found there, mixed with herbs and other plants. Where the lizards rested mushrooms grew, and when they ate those they got to see a new sunrise every second, and they fell in love with each other, and those lizards, and the fine cannabis they found there, but mostly just the mountain. They were the only two in that part of the East, and they both came so they could get to the top, because of what their fathers had told them.

"When they ate the mushrooms the last time they were half a mile from the peak. My father laid down in a plot of grass and watched the smoke rise all the way to the top. I don't know when it faded away, but in the end it was just smoke, so it did—and my father sat up and climbed back down. So did Yurimaru. They climbed rapidly and with purpose, and they didn't stop tripping until they reached the bottom. When they'd climbed they'd loved the mountain and themselves, and each other, and their hands had turned into the rocks about halfway down. Another hour and their faces would have become the stone, too, or so they say—but I don't think it matters, because they aren't stone now.

"They climbed down because they realized they were happy without the peak. They literally couldn't have been happier, so they considered it a conquest and decided to go home, to live again, because everything was static in that air. They were trapped in the East for a while when they got away, afraid for the mountain to be less than it was when they had to go through it again. Seven months later they knew they had to leave, so my father and Yurimaru packed up and got someone to drive them through the caves. They were wrong; the mountain was exactly as it had been. They were exactly as happy.

"Eventually they found a way back from the East off that horizon-less shore. They never told me how, but it wasn't the boat they had come on, which had been ship-wrecked. My father went back to Saffron and Yurimaru went back to Cianwood."

The pause here was barely tangible, but present regardless. Shane looked agitated, her face more disgruntled and her nose scrunched in such a way that her piercing became almost invisible.

"And?"

Hash thought about it. He had figured it was all pretty obvious up until she had pointed out that it wasn't.

"I'm going to the peak of the mountains in the East," he said. "And I'm going to collect tons of shrooms, and marijuana, and then I guess I'll go back home and see if Yurimaru is all right, too."

"I actually interpreted your little story as saying that the peak wasn't necessary. Did you not get that from it?"

"The peak must remain the goal; it is necessary."

"Fuck it, I just wanted to be a fuckin' tightrope walker and you've got all that shit to say. Fuck it, kid, if little stuff's impossible, God knows going half across the world to collect some perfect weed and shrooms is." Skinny scratched his nose, frowned in a way that was even more repulsive than his smile.

"Well, _I_ liked it," said the large one.

But Hashish didn't answer them. He hadn't been talking to them anyways.

* * *

Expect less emphasis on the geographical aspects of Pokemon and more on the actual Pokemon in the following chapters, because it is in the Pokemon category and all. 


End file.
